The carbon bubble is bursting,
as jobs fly from some of the biggest companies in the world,
because solar and wind power are taking over right now.
It’s too late to bet on the wrong nuclear horse
or the wrong pipelnie snake.
Get out of fossil fuels now: the sun is rising.

General Electric, whose new leadership is moving to eliminate bloat
and grapple with the fallout from earlier, ill-timed decisions, is
taking drastic steps to keep pace with seismic shifts in the global
energy industry.

The company said on Thursday that it would cut 12,000 jobs in its
power division, reducing the size of the unit’s work force by 18
percent as part of a push to compete with international rivals in a
saturated natural gas market, adjust to “softening” in
the oil and gas sectors and stay abreast of the growing demand for
renewable energy.

In agendas for the governmental group which supposedly has oversight of the landfill in Lowndes County, Georgia,
there is no mention at all of coal or coal ash.
Thanks to Julia Shewchuck of SGRC, those agendas
for the Deep South Solid Waste Authority (DSSWA)
are on the LAKE website.

2007 starts with one meeting with no mention of the landfill,
but the April 18, 2007 meeting has
“5. Discussion of Onyx/Langdale Proposed Land Swap”.
I don’t see any further mention of the Brooks County landfill
after that, and apparently it never happened.

Curiously, these mentions of the Brooks County Landfill on the DSSWA agenda
are all months after these VDT stories: Continue reading →

OSHA certified a “continuing pattern of retaliatory treatment”
at Kemper “clean” Coal after an employee
alerted Southern Company of alleged fraud: SO fired him, refused to hire him back and now he’s suing.
Plant “new nukes” Vogtle also had
impossible projections from the start and is even later and more overbudget,
while anybody from GA-PSC to Georgia EMCs to the Florida PSC
or even PowerSouth in Alabama could bring it down.
Somebody put Plant Vogtle out of its misery so we can get on with solar power
in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and everywhere else.

Two new cooling towers and construction cranes mark the work sites for nuclear reactors 3 and 4 at Plant Vogtle in east Georgia. The project is currently $3.6 billion over budget and almost four years behind the original schedule. JOHNNY EDWARDS / JREDWARDS@AJC.COM, in
Plant Vogtle: Georgia’s nuclear ‘renaissance’ now a financial quagmire by Russell Grantham and Johnny Edwards, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 19 May 2017.

Mostly I post about solar and wind power winning, which is what I think is happening.
But sometimes it’s worth a reminder of what could happen if we do nothing about
climate change, and I posted on my facebook page a story about that.
Which actually didn’t go far enough to the real worst case.
Nonetheless, that story has been attacked by numerous parties of all political
and scientific and unscientific stripes for being too doom and gloom.
Yet none of the attackers bothered to mention a best case beyond
“the same world we have now”.
I have news for you: the world we have now is an ecological catastrophe,
and we can do a lot better.
So here’s the real worst case,
the current case, which is far from the best of
all possible worlds,
and the real best case, as I see it.
Plus
what we can do to head for the best case.

In case anybody thinks he was making any of that stuff up,
Wallace-Wells has also linked to an annotated version
with footnotes for every substantial assertion.
The annotated version notes at the top: Continue reading →

Tom Fanning, our genial CEO host,
said some things I’ve never heard him say before like
Southern Company is
“pivoting towards wind”
and SO’s board soon has to decide whether to go forward with Plant Vogtle
“or not” probably by August.
Fanning gets the
first and
last word in this blog post,
plus a complete transcript of what
I asked and
Tom Fanning’s response,
along with summaries of the other questions and answers.

Please hear me!
I think renewables are exceedingly important in the future.
— Tom Fanning, CEO, Southern Company

While its natural gas percentage remained flat, and coal and nuclear decreased, Southern Company (SO) more than doubled its renewable energy generation percentage in one year.
Maybe I’ll mention that at the annual shareholder meeting in May.